The Troubled Development of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric Explained

Tamaki, writer for Unseen64, has made a video that sheds light on what went wrong during the development of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. And if you assumed that Big Red Button had to put up with a lot of crap that made it unreasonable to expect them to put out a good game, you’d be right.

The video explains various things that went wrong like how the studio had to switch from developing for next-gen hardware to the Wii U (which is why early footage looks better than the final game), bad working conditions and more. Be sure to give it a watch, especially if you thought that the game being so bad was just because of the developers being incompetent.

20 Comments

So wait, this is supposed to make me feel bad and sympathies with BRB? You know, nobody even asked for all these changes, all we wanted was a fun game, and the use of CE3 was a bad decision as they should have been prepared for the shift to the WiiU!

I don’t care how badly some people want to believe western developers are capable of making a good Sonic game, they never made a single decent one, with Sonic Spinball, Sonic R, Sonic Xtreme, Sonic Chronicles, and Sonic Boom, think about it!

Now what I really don’t understand is how come we haven’t heard any news about the newly released Crush 40 soundtrack, it even has several Sonic remixes such as What I’m Made Of, With Me, Free, and Sonic Youth!

“I don’t care how badly some people want to believe western developers are capable of making a good Sonic game, they never made a single decent one, with Sonic Spinball, Sonic R, Sonic Xtreme, Sonic Chronicles, and Sonic Boom, think about it!”

Why should they prepare to port the game to Wii U when they never planned to make the game for that platform? None of us know if it would have been a fun game if the switch to Wii U didn’t happen. It could very well have been that without development problems they it would have been a mediocre game. Could also have been that they would have heavily improved the game. Point is: Sonic Boom shouldn’t be used as an example of what Big Red Button is capable of, cause they didn’t really get the chance to show what they can do with that game.

Also, I guess that means that Sonic 2, 3 and Knuckles are all terrible cause those were all made in the west. And all of the fangames, hacks and mods that are on this site. Oh, and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, let’s not forget that that was made by dirty western people as well.

@GerbilSoft lol are you seriously playing the “Taxman” card? Let’s forget for a second the fact THESE ARE REMAKES OF JAPAN DEVELOPED GAMES, these remakes were made by one person “two if you count Stealth” who did it with passion and SEGA just happened to pay him for it, remember before he was hired by SEGA he was working on his own to remake Sonic CD for the PSP!

“If you count Stealth” and his having developed half of the core game for each of 1 and 2, fixed the vast majority of the non-Retro-Engine bugs that were introduced by everyone during remaking, notably-increased the accuracy of many major aspects of the game that weren’t originally remade by him, performed massive game-spanning collision-tweak tasks both to account for conversion errors and make levels suitably-playable for Tails and Knuckles and thus convince Sonic Team to even approve their inclusion, and designed/implemented the vast majority of the additional features everyone loves so much, from most of the additional level sections, to Debug Mode Extras, to the additional play modes found in the level select menu, to the spiced-up ending to Sonic 2, etc. But, you know, you don’t -have- to because none of that is really worth mentioning

Welp…all I can say is that I hope Sega’s learned their lesson. I mean, they did to a certain extent after the failure of Sonic ’06, and to date haven’t REALLY repeated it (Sonic Boom does not equal Sonic 06), so I’m walking away from this on at least that positive note.

That said, given how the fanbase has pretty much reacted to Sonic Boom (which is worthy of some criticism too, but I’ll restrain myself), I doubt that even if Sega hadn’t pulled this on BRB, it wouldn’t have helped Sonic Boom’s popularity all that much, especially seeing that it was clearly stated Boom was already mostly finished before BRB got word they needed to switch consoles, so a doubt it really would’ve been that different of a game. At best, the graphics would’ve been improved, but the gameplay basically the same as it stands now.

@Timmit I wasn’t being raciest, I was speaking my opinion about how I feel about BRB, yes there are many great western developed games, and I admit Sumo made really good ones, I’ll go ahead and say I also like Sega Superstars Tennis, I always did, also I wasn’t ignoring the other comments but by the time I saw the other comments I have already posted mine and I didn’t want to “spam” the front page.

Anyway, my point is, history doesn’t show that “western developers know how to make better Sonic games” as many in this community like to say, and honestly I was perfectly happy with the direction Sonic Lost World was taking, finally since Sonic Adventure 2 a Sonic game I was really enjoying.

As for Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 while they were developed in the US they were being made by Japanese developers (unless I got that information wrong) I know Yuji Naka did most of the coding, so the “western developers make better Sonic games” theory fails, again not trying to be racist!

Uhh, has anyone mentioned that Cevat Yerli once stated just after Crysis 3’s release that the game ran “wonderfully” on the WiiU but wouldn’t come out due to EA dropping support for the Wii U. Now, Crysis 3 is a CryEngine 3 game so……………. something’s amiss here.

Nintendo’s Wii and WiiU hardware has been intentionally less strong than its competitors. The Wii was basically suped-up GameCube tech, and the WiiU is about on par with the PS3 and 360 in terms of power. So while calling the WiiU “last gen” isn’t really correct, it is an apt description of the hardware.